Journal of Sacred Work

"Not to be onto something is to be in despair."  – Walker Percy, from The Moviegoer

   I have told this story before and I tell it again today in hopes it will help you in your journey as a caregiver. I lived more than fifty years thinking I was "onto something" before, in 1997, I finally experienced real despair. This despair arrived when the company I was helping run was acquired and I was suddenly out of a job. I went from the world being too much with me to a world that suddenly looked empty.
   Since I had made the lifelong mistake of defining myself by what I did rather than who I was, the subtraction of my job left me in the half-light of being "no one." Who was I if I wasn’t working? Back then, my inability to find this answer plunged me into depression. To survive, I needed to re-sculpt my life view. I was not my job. But who was I?
   The current recession provokes organizations into their own kind of desperation. Anxious to survive, hospitals and other charities pick up the often harsh sculpting tools of corporations. They carve away operating expenses and slash the workforce. The human cost can be devastating because, in hospitals and charities, this means that many committed caregivers wake up one dark day to discover their work has been stolen from them….

   Most of us awaken some number of times across our night’s sleep. When I do, my nocturnal thoughts sometimes include my work. After awhile in any job, our occupation becomes part of the furniture of our life. For some, it may be as important as the floor. What happens when the floor we have paced each day vanishes and leaves in its place what appears to be a black hole?
   According to popular psychology and theology, we are all required to travel through a dark night on our pathway to whatever glory lives on the other side. But in the middle of the darkness, this thought offers
little solace. Instead, the best part of courage calls us to endure the journey until, one day, we enter not a world of busy task work but a more peaceful state of being. In this new state of being, our lives are not defined by our work. We are who we are – divine beings lashed, for a time, to this earth.
   In high school, I memorized the lines of an 1806 Wordsworth sonnet that begins:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;

   It may be that when we spend too much time trying to be "onto something" we actually lose our connection to the dearest part of the world – the center that is, itself, divine. When we can no longer connect to nature, we have separated ourselves from life itself. As Wordsworth’s poem continues, he decries that when the world is too much with us, "We have  given our hearts away…/For this, for everything, we are out of tune…"
   How do we regain our truest voice? How do you recover balance when "he world is too much" with you?

-Erie Chapman